Mikhail Khodorkovsky Quotes

Large Companies Cannot Finance Political Parties As Their Shareholders And Employees Have Different Political Views.

My Parents Were Muscovites. They Worked At The Kaliber Factory.

What's Important To Me Now Is To Uphold My Good Name And Achieve A Fair Court Decision - The Past Cannot Be Recovered Anyway.

I Have Always Defended My Convictions And What I Believed To Be The Truth.

Opposition Work Is Not Without Its Dangers. But If You've Chosen A Job Like That For Yourself, You Then Subsequently Shouldn't Spend Your Time Every Second Thinking, Oh My God, What Might Happen To Me? Oh My God, What Might Happen To Me? Your Colleagues Include Quite A Large Number Of War Correspondents. Their Job Is Not The Least Dangerous In The World, Either.

By Equating Putin And Russia, You Are Creating A Situation That's The Opposite Of What You Would Like To Have Happen.

Putin Has An Obvious Problem. His Country's Economy Is In Stagnation. He Needs To Constantly Be Pointing A Figure At Who Is At Fault. America Is At Fault. He Needs To Show Those Fronts - Those Directions In Which He Is Defeating America. In Syria, For Example, In Syria, He Is Defeating America; Not Isis, He's Defeating America.

And So, Now Things That Are Important Are, For Example, The Upcoming Elections. It's Important That Society Demonstrate That It Is Not Pretending That These Elections Are Elections.

It's A Very Erroneous Strategy To Try To Push The Russian Opposition To Unite. First Of All, The Opposition Is Addressing Different Parts Of Russian Society That Have Differing Points Of View. And Besides, A United Opposition Is A Nice Big Target That The Authorities Have A Much Easier Time Fighting. And Besides, Resisting An Authoritarian Regime With An Authoritarian Opposition Merely Means That, In The Event Of Victory, You're Just Doing Yet Another Round Of The Same Old, Same Old.

If We Talk About Changes Of Power In Russia, That Has Occurred Several Times In The Past Century. After Stalin Came Khrushchev, Who Implemented His Legacy Quite Radically, One Could Say. But There Was No Blood, Nonetheless. After Brezhnev Came Gorbachev. I'm Not Talking About The Ones Who Were In Power For Only A Short Period Of Time. Gorbachev, Too, Left A Very Radical Legacy.

People Take The Lazy Way Out, And Do Not Regard Putin And The Kremlin As The Real Enemy. They Create A Long But Erroneous Chain In Their Heads. Putin Is The Leader Of Russia. Putin Does X, Therefore Russia Is Doing X, And Russia Is Our Enemy. And So, We Introduce Sanctions, For Example, Against Russia.

Russian People Really Don't Like It When Somebody Does Horrible Things In Russia, And Then Can Calmly Go Travel To Another Country And Spend Time There. And This Is What Needs To Be Done: The Russian People Need To Be Told This, Because In Today's World, Just Doing Something Is Not Enough. You've Got To Tell About It, Too. If You've Done Something And Haven't Told About It, It's As Good As If You Hadn't Done It At All.